


You Can't Return to the Place You Never Left

by MissEllaVation



Category: U2 (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 17:31:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20492594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissEllaVation/pseuds/MissEllaVation
Summary: I feel bad if a couple of months go by and I don’t write about B and E. So I asked likeamadonna to give me an era, any era. She gave me The Joshua Tree. Thanks Queen! I took it back just a little further so I could write something about one of my favorite songs, “Deep in the Heart,” which was the b-side for “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” These two songs sound utterly different from each other, but as far as I can tell, they’re both about searching for something, longing for something, and not quite having it. I’ve never heard (or read) anything much about this song, so when Bono describes it to Edge, his description is merely my own conjecture. I mean, EVERYTHING about this is my own conjecture, of course. No research, just mutual pining and love. 3547 words, Edge p.o.v.A million thanks to the Coven, and to anyone else who is still reading my stuff.Note: I’ve tried to pepper their speech with the very occasional Irishism. I might be terribly wrong. Good luck, so. :)





	You Can't Return to the Place You Never Left

**Author's Note:**

> I feel bad if a couple of months go by and I don’t write about B and E. So I asked likeamadonna to give me an era, any era. She gave me The Joshua Tree. Thanks Queen! I took it back just a little further so I could write something about one of my favorite songs, “Deep in the Heart,” which was the b-side for “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” These two songs sound utterly different from each other, but as far as I can tell, they’re both about searching for something, longing for something, and not quite having it. I’ve never heard (or read) anything much about this song, so when Bono describes it to Edge, his description is merely my own conjecture. I mean, EVERYTHING about this is my own conjecture, of course. No research, just mutual pining and love. 3547 words, Edge p.o.v.
> 
> A million thanks to the Coven, and to anyone else who is still reading my stuff. 
> 
> Note: I’ve tried to pepper their speech with the very occasional Irishism. I might be terribly wrong. Good luck, so. :)

Saturday afternoon and I’m walking from a distant car-park to our pub, watching a girl who’s walking about ten meters ahead of me on the pavement. She’s one of those drop-dead Dublin types, moving fast like she’s on a mission, sleek midnight-black hair skimming her shoulders. It’s the hair that draws me. I can’t see all of her at once because there are too many people between us, but I can catch glimpses, gestures. The sun lights up a pair of gold buttons where her dark coat nips in at the waist. Below that, the coat flares out, and it sways with every step she takes. The buttons wink back at me like cat’s eyes. I can’t help but conjecture about the flesh beneath them: does it also nip in and flare out, like the coat?

It’s been a while since I felt this kind of lift, this pull, the warm possibility contained in the body of a stranger on the street. A body—I mean, a person—who you haven’t already been sleeping with for eight years. I don’t think I fully appreciated that brief, exuberant time when everything about us was about our bodies, mine and hers. That golden moment before home ownership and kids, before the daily struggle over dinner, because one kid won’t eat this and the other won’t eat that, and what kind of idiot gets himself into this sort of mess when he’s just on the brink of international rock stardom, anyway? Love is a tether made of muscle and tendon. Sometimes you want to tear it, but at what cost?

So I watch this strange girl dart and weave on the pavement. I let my mind wander to ridiculous things, like what would happen if I were to catch up with her and lift her hair with my hands, breathe in her perfume, put my lips to the back of her neck? Would she know who I am? Of course she would. They all do. I may not be the cutest boy in the band, but I can still make the girls stammer and blush.

This girl must be quite something, though. Everyone on the street is looking at her. Some cad slips out of the shadows to lay a hand on her arm, and instead of giving him a knee to the bollix she actually stops to listen to him. She really is listening. First she tilts her head a bit, then she turns it thoughtfully to one side.

And—what? Fucking hell.

She’s _him._

Isn’t she? No. Yes. Jesus Christ. She’s Bono. The drop-dead-black-haired Dublin girl I wanted to touch has been Bono all along, making his way to the pub just ahead of me, with his dippy/graceful pigeon-toed walk. There’s his fecking massive nose poking out of that perfect helmet of hair. God, if you’re up there? This isn’t funny. This isn’t funny at all.

He’s had his hair cut and darkened since last week. All sleek and shiny, no more raggedy split ends. One might call the style a pageboy, or a longish bob. The coat must be new as well. And because everyone’s wearing big shoulder pads these days, surely I can be forgiven for thinking he was a trendy girl?…But I ought to know that walk by now. It’s not like this is his first time in high heeled boots.

The real worry, the thing that scares me, the thing that infuriates me, is that I still feel that lift, that hopeful effervescence in the guts, and down lower. It won’t quite let me go. Worse yet, this response to Bono is not without precedent. And we both know that.

Do I laugh or do I cry? Should I turn and run home?

*

He offers to get the pints in while I claim our usual spot in the snug, but of course he’s waylaid en route to the bar. He must shake everyone’s hands, and receive both praise and insult with equal good humor. Always with that smile that starts slowly, then spreads across his face like the beam of a searchlight. No one can resist. Not even the ones who want so badly to dislike him. I’m very sorry, sir or madam, but the truth is that he never felt loved enough at home, so he must compensate by seducing everyone he meets. You are no exception, Mr. Doyle. Nor are you, Granny McBride. He’s just so good at it.

The seduction is not supposed to work on me, of course. I’m not supposed to become suffused with warmth when he studies my hands, something like the way Aislinn used to when we first met. When he actually lifts one of my hands from the table so he can study each finger and then mumble something about “the place those silvery notes are born,” I am not supposed to get hard.

I close my eyes and lean back against the banquette, until the sound of two pints of Guinness landing on the wooden table jolts me back to full consciousness. Bono slides into his seat, pulls a pint toward himself, blows gently across the foam. “Well, I wrote some lyrics for that odd song we did.”

“Oh good. Which one?” The beer tastes like chocolate and oak, like sliding into a good dark leather chair. Froth like a soothing balm on my lips.

“The one that actually sounds like U2.” Bono catches my eye and laughs. “The one—you know.” He imitates the sound of a guitar playing a harsh, bending, annunciatory note.

“Oh yeah, the weird one.”

“Well, I listened to it about thirty times last night before I went to bed.”

“Did you write the lyrics in your sleep?”

“No, but the music was stuck in my head, and I dreamed I was flying, like a moth, back and forth, throwing myself against a lighted window.” He suddenly has that half-mad look in his left eye, like when he’s talking to a crowd between songs and the spirit takes him. “And I realized it was the bathroom window in me Dad’s house, the one I used to climb into if I’d been out too late. The next window over was my room, and I knew Ali was in there waiting for me. But then somehow it wasn’t Ali waiting, it was my mother.”

“Ah. Well, dreams are strange like that, aren’t they? Come here though, did you fit all of that into the lyrics?”

“No, not exactly. It’s more of a sketch, I guess. But in the dream, I wanted to get into that room so badly, and I couldn’t get the window open. I was—maybe not a moth after all, but a soul without a body. Dead, or else not born yet. I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I just wanted to see her.”

“Well. Dreams…” I shrug; I don’t know what else to say. Bono’s mother is difficult emotional territory. She’s his muse, if he has one.

“I don’t dream much about her, but when I do she’s always on the wrong side of something. A door, or a street, with traffic between us.”

I don’t believe in ghosts, but he conjures her in my mind. He conjures his mother, whose picture I’ve seen, standing on the wrong side of the road with her dark hair and dark lipstick, and a more delicate version of her son’s nose, his smile. She was an oddly pretty little woman, at least in her pictures. But I don’t even want to imagine my own mother being on the wrong side of something, or my dad locking me out of the house, not even in a dream.

“Anyway Edge, this song won’t fit in with this album. It’s too much about home, about Dublin. Nothing American about it.”

Why does he suddenly look so fragile? I swear he does it on purpose. He’s a demon, a _púca_, changing his shape at will. I want to touch his face. I take a drink instead. “Better to have too many songs than not enough.”

“Maybe it can be a b-side.”

“Maybe _you_ can be a b-side.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.” I’m feeling the effects of the Guinness faster than usual; I’m feeling dark and fizzy. “Sure, it can be a b-side. I think we’re gonna have a lot of ‘em. It’ll be great.”

“Are you nervous about this record?”

“No. Yes. I mean, same as every record.” I have to think about this for a few seconds. Guinness. Carbonation. Swallow. “I do feel more pressure, honestly, ever since Live Aid. Like we’re on the cusp of something.”

“Yes, a cusp. Cusp. _Cusp_. What a weird word. Almost a synonym for ‘edge.’” Bono drains his pint and smiles. “Your round?”

*

I didn’t mean to drink so much, but the pub is so dark and warm, and after a couple of hours Bono and I become just another fixture, like the old fellas in the corner with their caps and smoke and grizzled laughter. No one bothers us.

Bono is singing lyrics to me now, from his song about being a moth at his own bathroom window. He’s leaning all the way across the table with his mouth close to my ear, so I can hear him above the stereo and the general din: _The scent of cedar, I can still see her, you can’t return to the place you never left. Angel, I wanna be home tonight…_

His voice breaks on “angel.” This is intentional. It sounds like crying. It sounds like coming.

“Bono, stop.” It’s all I can do not to shove him away. Too much.

“You don’t like it.”

“No, I do, but it’s so, em, intimate. Do you always have to be so—”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

He gives me a rueful smile, that deep blue look from under his eyebrows. His hair falls forward, perfectly cut, like black silk. There’s always one dark-haired starlet that Hollywood allows in every couple of years, under the radar, and then she has to play all the offbeat, rebel-girl roles because none of the blondes can do that. That’s what he looks like. The rebel girl.

_Edge,_ I remind myself, _he is not a girl. He is your best friend._

“I want you to sing on this one too,” he says. “In your lower voice. Your dad-voice, you know. What’s the matter, The Edge? You look a little glazed.”

“I’m scuttered. Didn’t mean to drink so much so early.”

“It’s fine. You’re safe with me.” Grinning now. He tucks his hair back behind his ear. Big hoop earring glinting there, clinging to his earlobe. The left ear. Meaning he’s straight. Right ear pierced means gay, apparently. He asked the jeweler beforehand to make sure he got it right. No, left.

Staring at my hands again.

“Beautiful hands you’ve got, The Edge. I’m envious.”

“Your own hands are perfectly fine.”

“They’re big workman’s hands. Serviceable, I guess.”

“They’re warm.” He’s touching my fingers with his. “Quit it.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s—”

“Edge.”

I’ve got to break the tension. “Don’t complain about your hands, Bono. Be glad you have that great head of hair.”

“Oh now Edge. You look _trés raffinée_ in that beret. Which happens to be mine, by the way.”

“Well it’s mine now.”

“Can I borrow it back next week?”

“Sure.”

“You’re the only truly handsome one in the band, you know.” Bono tilts his head this way and that, studying me. “Larry makes a good pinup boy. But you’re the one who was drawn with fine lines, with a fine-point pen. You know what I mean.”

I’m so warm, in all the wrong places. “You want to get your eyes checked.”

“I can see you perfectly well, Edge.”

Oh Jaysis, I’m drunk and I want to touch him, I want to shove the table away and pull him up into my arms. I want it to be like it was two summers ago when we were perhaps just a touch more drunk than this, and he slipped me the tongue in an alley behind Temple Bar. I want it to be like six winters ago, when we were not even drunk at all, but shivering under a blanket in the backseat of an unheated van, holding each other’s freezing cold hands, pressing closer and closer.

He’s still talking. Praising my face, my elegant Renaissance nose, my Siberian horseman’s eyes. Whatever that means. It means something to him. What else matters?

“Edge.”

“Yes.”

His knee presses mine under the table. My heart thrums like a trapped rabbit.

“Edge. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes. I’m your captive audience. Speak.”

“When we were in London, the first time—do you remember?”

“Of course I do.”

He doesn’t say anything more. Just bends his neck the way he does, looks up at me from under his eyebrows, the sleek hair falling forward again, a little damp now, because he’s drunk and flushed (alcohol dilates your blood vessels, your blood moves freely, it moves everywhere), damp tendrils of hair stick to his cheek, his long nose, his smile…does he know he looks like this?

“…And we were lonely, the girls were at home, and we were in the big city, and we were all worked up after every show but we were being good…”

“Bono, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“We were sitting on that couch. You said you were homesick, and asked me to give you a hug, just to feel some human contact.”

I _was_ homesick. My throat felt raw all the time, as if I were on the verge of tears all day long. I was only eighteen. But the homesickness wasn’t all of it, because when he took me in his arms…we were sweaty in that too-warm rented flat, and he was so warm. I was remarkably skinny back then, like a lizard, but he was solid, complete, a little man. I had touched his hair, all thick and damp. My hand on the back of his head. I kissed him almost without realizing what I was doing and he drew back, but then leaned in, his lips opening just a tiny bit until we sprang apart, laughing. “Edge, what the fook?” He punched my upper arm and it hurt for half an hour. But after that we kept watching each other, because something was there between us, a presence that was made of both of us, of our bodies, of our t-shirts, of the smell of bar soap and green corner-shop shampoo.

“Of course I remember. We were kids away from home. We were excited and scared. That was a different time.”

“No it wasn’t. It wasn’t different.”

We are still in a pub, this pub, our pub. A public house. Public. I lean across the table and whisper, “what do you want from me, Bono?

“I don’t know.”

“You have to stop pushing. I mean, it’s like this almost every time we drink, which is frequently—”

“Yes. And when it happens—you know—it feels right.”

Oh, it does, it does. “But it _isn’t_ right. No, I don’t mean that. It’s right for lots of people, of course. But not for us.”

“Why not for us?”

“Bono. We are married. To a couple of beautiful women. I have children at home.”

“Yes.”

“And the band.”

“Yes.”

“We have to think of the band.”

“We _are_ the band.”

“We are not the only people in the band, Bono. There are actually quite a lot of people who keep this band functioning. What if we were to—I mean, they work for us. For their livelihood.”

“Are you saying that if we”—now he leans across the table again, closer, puts his mouth terribly close to my ear again—“that if we kissed, if we were lovers, if we fucked—”

“Bono…Jesus Christ.”

“Do you think people still care about things like that?”

“Yes, I do. I realize it’s the eighties, but I do think people still care, and I do think that sort of thing can still ruin a career.”

“What a killjoy you are.” He slumps back, looking fragile again. Saying all of these things outright has cost him something. He’s so good at making performance look easy, but I, of all people, know how hard he works. “At least tell me you want me, Edge. Tell me you’ve thought about it.”

“Of course I’ve fucking thought about it.” My heart aches for him. I don’t mean to sound so harsh. Something more is required of me. I reach out to touch his arm, lightly, then draw my hand back. “We should get out of here before—I don’t know. We don’t have to go home, but we can’t stay here.”

*

It’s dark and cold by the river, but this is what we want. Anonymity. The only people around us now are drunks. Not occasional drunks like us, but habitual ones, sleeping rough. We pull our collars up around our faces and drop money into their cups. We are thanked, but no one makes a fuss. They don’t know us, or else they don’t care.

“It’s so cold for them,” Bono says, shuddering.

“You have such a good heart, Bono.”

“No.”

“You do. I know you’d bring them all home with you if you could.”

We are walking very close together. Neither of us are ready to drive home. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but the pub is shut now, and even if it were open, we couldn’t stay there and have the conversation we need to have, the same one, over and over again. We must be doing this to ourselves on purpose, escalating. Maybe the tension is what keeps us creative. Maybe to surrender to it would—I can't think about that.

I steer Bono to a bench in a particularly isolated spot. We sit silently and huddle into our coats. His breath is visible as wispy smoke. It’s typical that once we have some privacy we can’t figure out what to say.

“Can I lean on you a bit?” he asks, at last. “It _is_ cold out here.”

“Of course.” It doesn’t matter here. No one can see us. We’re just two dark figures in dark coats, part of the greater darkness. Two street people partaking of each other’s warmth.

Bono shape-shifts again. He makes himself feel so small, so insubstantial. I’m overcome with the urge to protect him—from the cold night air and from whatever danger may lurk here, around the docks, in the night—to protect his face, and his voice, and his beautiful swan neck, which is the temple that shelters his voice.

I drape my arm over him. He leans closer, rests his head against my chest. I can stroke his hair. I can do that much. It is allowable among friends. Isn’t it? Or am I too drunk to care? But once I start, once I touch his hair, I realize how much I’ve wanted to touch it all day. It does feel like silk, at least for now. It will go back to its natural state in a day or two. It wants to be curly but he brushes it straight. Why do I know this? I work my fingers through, gently. I feel the shape of his head. I fancy I can feel all the thoughts inside it: the melodies, the lyrics, the thousand injustices that he wants to fix, as well as his more local responsibilities. That one photograph of his mam and da. Ali. The band. Me. _Me._

He slips down a little further, a little further, until his head is in my lap. Fine. What difference does it make? No one can see us here. And it feels good, it feels right. My hand in his hair, his face turned toward me, his cheek on my thigh. I keep working my fingers through his hair, tugging gently, then soothing.

“Edge.”

“Yes.”

“I would, you know.” He whispers this into my groin. “If you wanted me to. I would.”

I look around me wildly. There’s no one. Just a few lights in the buildings across the river. The drunks are all sleeping now. If I wanted. _If,_ Jesus Christ. “I know, Bono. I know.”

“Would you? I mean, would you, for me?”

How many times I’ve thought about this. Never on a bench in the cold, but there’s always a couch: the old one in the London flat, the expensive one in his study at home, the ugly gray one in the studio. A couch, with Bono sat upon it, me kneeling on the floor between his legs. His hands in my thinning hair, his voice, his pleasure. I think about this a lot in my private moments. He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t.

“Not here, Bono. Not tonight.”

“Someday, Edge.”

It seems inevitable right now anyway, pre-ordained. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how it feels. We’re still a little drunk. We are neither here nor there. Who can it hurt if I just say what he wants to hear? If I hold his head in my hand, if I stroke his hair for just one minute more?

“Someday, Bono.”


End file.
